recitative is perhaps his strongest point, for in spite of the beauty of one or two isolated songs, such as the famous 'Bois epais' in 'Amadis' and Charon's wonderful air in 'Alceste,' his melodic gift was not great, and his choral writing is generally of the most unpretentious description. But his recitative is always solid and dignified, and often impassioned and pathetic. Music, too, owes him a great debt for his invention of what is known as the French form of overture, consisting of a prelude, fugue, and dance movement, which was afterwards carried to the highest conceivable pitch of perfection by Handel. Meanwhile an offshoot of the French school, transplanted to the banks of the Thames, had blossomed into a brief but brilliant life under the fostering care of the greatest musical genius our island has ever produced, Henry Purcell. Charles II. was not a profound musician, but he knew what sort of music he liked, and on one point his mind was made up--that he did not like the music of the elderly composers who had survived the Protectorate, and came forward at his restoration to claim the posts which they had held at his father's court. Christopher Gibbons, Child, and other relics of the dead polyphonic school were quietly dismissed to provincial organ-lofts, and Pelham Humphreys, the most promising of the 'Children of the Chapel Royal,' was sent over to Paris to learn all that was newest in music at the feet of Lulli. Humphreys came back, in the words of Pepys, 'an absolute Monsieur,' full of the latest theories concerning opera and music generally, and with a sublime contempt for the efforts of his stay-at-home colleagues. His own music shows the French influence very strongly, and in that of his pupil Henry Purcell (1658-1695) it may also be perceived, although coloured and transmuted by the intensely English character of Purcell's own genius. For many years it was supposed that Purcell's first and, strictly speaking, his only opera, 'Dido and AEneas,' was written by him at the age of seventeen and produced in 1675. Mr. Barclay Squire has now proved that it was not produced until much later, but this scarcely lessens the wonder of it, for Purcell can never have seen an opera performed, and his acquaintance with the new art-form must have been based upon Pelham Humphrey's account of the performances which he had seen in Paris. Possibly, too, he may have had opportunities of studying the engraved scores of some of Lulli's operas, which, considering the close intercourse between the courts of France and England, may have found their way across the Channel. 'Dido and AEneas' is now universally spoken of as the first English opera. Masques had been popular from the time of Queen Elizabeth onwards, which the greatest living poets and musicians had not disdained to produce, and Sir William Davenant had given performances of musical dramas 'after the manner of the Ancients' during the closing years of the Commonwealth, but it is probable that